About the author (1978)

William Kotzwinkle was born in 1938 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He attended Rider College and Pennsylvania State University.He worked as an editor and writer in the 1960s. William Kotzwinkle is an accomplished author who is best known for his book of the film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, but who has produced a range of work for both adults and children that often transgresses genre boundaries and the distinction between serious and popular fiction. Beginning as a children's writer with The Fireman, he then published novels for adults such as Hermes 3000, The Fan Man, and Queen of Swords, which began to establish him as an original and distinctive novelist. But it was Doctor Rat that made his reputation as a powerful fantasy writer with a sharp satirical edge. The novel focuses upon laboratory rats whose spokesman, the Doctor Rat of the title, eventually escapes from the vast laboratory where experiments on his fellow-creatures are taking place, and whose adventures are interwoven with shorter tales told by animals of different kinds who finally try to form a whole that will make humans more peaceful and benign. But they are all killed. William Kotzwinkle is a novelist and poet, who is known for his broad range of style and subject. He is a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. He lives with his wife, author Elizabeth Gundy, in Maine. He has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for Doctor Rat in 1977. He published The Million Dollar Bear in 1994.